Bad Beats are overhead; Chips, the cost of doing business. and business is good.

There is never a certain prescribed way to play a hand, just a way to think about them. There's the expected result, based on analysis, and the actual result, based on events.

It's not winning that makes a winner, but losing. The excitement is not from the winning, it's avoiding the disaster, because you're flirting with it every day. When my "behavioral finance" stuff kicks in, and I only want to win, but can't take the sting of a lose, I am "risk averse" or more accurately "lose averse", after all, I am gambling in a casino!

I always say-"Whether my decision is good or bad depends on how I make it, not on the outcome". LOOSE players are looking for reasons to CALL; TIGHT, to FOLD. Last night, I sat down with a bunch of loose players---and when the right people show up, the right game does too.

Focus on decisions not consequences

Here's the scenerio: Preflop decision with K10 off suit in a multiway pot- There's a six dollar straddle, I re-raise $15 last to act, trying to steal the straddle or at least go heads up. with the button! I get reraised to $100,(I am thinking small pair88 or JJ who wants to isolate) then something crazy happened: call, call, call. Pocket 99 folds. That's 4 to 1 on my money---I know I am a dog. I defined my hand early, when it was cheap to do so, and have to put others on pocket pairs, but poker is situational, and these cats at the table are loosey goosey. SO:

Making the wrong mistake at the right time

I call with ATC's (Any two cards) right? Ok, I get lucky and flop a made Broadway straight, with no draws! and rake in a massive pot---going from Zero to Hero. I went against my mantra--"When you don't have good cards, somebody else probably does" but I got my FREAKonomoics on!

Sklansky’s old school ABC's: The Gap Concept, didn't apply this time---“you need a better hand to call a raise with than you would need to open the betting yourself”.

I felt I was getting the right odds to call. Sometimes poker is a feeling, sometimes a verb. (That's the huge buckets of luck that go with the territory).

I didn't really make a probability based decision--How many outs do I have? What are the immediate odds-pre flop, flop, turn and river? (In this case, the implied odds of all the money left on the table was too huge to fold preflop) What are the long shot odds for you and your opponent, once you put him on a range of hands? I made the wrong mistake at the right time.

For these loose players , the second hundred was not worth as much as the first.

The reason for I called the $100 was that my opponents Utility of (Chips) Money changed based on how many chips they already had. Most $700 behind. In ECON 101: Each level of worth or income has associated with it a certain level of utility. That utility is not necessarily going to increase uniformly. For This is called Diminishing Marginal Utility.

And according to my theory of poker; Too much respect for money makes you a bad no limit player---These guys were "good" players because they had no respect for their money!

Doing the same thing over again is an obscenity.

Poker is too random to be left up to chance. It's situtational too. Big hands for big pots--not committing your big stack with weak small hands---I need a poker time out...because nothing fails like success. You can't lose what you don't put into the pot and if I keep on putting my money in bad like this I'll get broke.

Think about good decisions, not results. It's about the process not pots won---the chips will come. Do what you love and the money will follow--have a love affair with making sound decisions based on partial information. It is, after all, about excelling, not winning or losing a particular hand.

Make probability based decisions--How many outs do you have? What are the immediate odds-pre flop, flop, turn and river? What are the long shot odds for you and your opponent, once you put him on a range of hands? The universal tell in poker is called betting!

I once wrote:

It is better to be skillful than lucky but then again.... I wasn’t born with the math gene, in fact, I am a math atheist: but after "beasting out" both on The Theory Of Poker and The Mathematics of Poker, I realize that poker is less an exploitive strategy, and more an optimal one. Once having said that, we don't need to deify poker math and won't bring its math to the game ---we bring strategy to it, an optimal strategy, yet it still remains dependent on opponents actions and tells.